Most LCDs used to display a dense amount of information employ a backlight assembly to generate light that passes through a stack of components consisting of a variety of glass and plastic layers, including the liquid crystal (LC) layer and its controller that is typically a thin-film transistor. A typical LCD contains millions of pixels each consisting of red, green, and blue sub-pixels that are individually controlled to determine the instantaneous color for each pixel of the display. The specific makeup of the overall LCD stack of components determines the visual properties of the displayed image including brightness, color range, resolution, and viewing range.
The light that exits an LCD must compete with any surrounding ambient light in order for the LCD to be readable by the observer. In addition, light typically exits the LCD in a large range of angles and ultimately reflects off any surrounding surfaces, thus adding even more to the ambient light environment that the directly-observable light from the LCD must compete with. These problems may increase as the LCD becomes brighter and/or the surrounding reflective surfaces become closer to the LCD and/or the observer.
In some environments the reflection of stray LCD light off of surrounding surfaces creates a situation that is highly problematic for the observer. This phenomenon is particularly critical, for example, in the relatively tight confines of an aircraft cockpit. To make matters worse, an aircraft cockpit typically contains many metallic and glass surfaces which easily reflect both the ambient light and the non-direct LCD light, herein lumped into the single term stray light, and the pilot also needs to have excellent visibility through the windows or canopy of the cockpit. However, such stray light can be problematic in many other environments including but not limited to, automobiles, watercraft, and heavy equipment.